The Business Case For a Social Media Analytics Tool

A social media manager with access to an effective analytics tool is a well-rounded and powerful marketer. Let’s take a look at the different stages of a social media marketing campaign and how using a specialised social media analytics tool can make a difference.

How social media analytics tools help you with your marketing campaigns

In an ideal world you would just publish a piece of content and achieve great engagement. In the real world that’s saturated with content it just doesn’t work like that. A lot of work is done behind the scenes of a successful campaign, such as researching and planning in order to create the best possible user experience.

This process can be very time-consuming if you don’t know what you are looking for, or if you don’t have access to a social media analytics tool that helps you work smarter and more efficiently. Locowise is “the Google Analytics of social media” and provides an easy way to make better content decisions. Here’s how Locowise can help you improve your next social media campaign:

Content research and planning

A lot of research and idea gathering goes into the process of creating engaging content. There are two ways you can approach this. You can look inward. Who is your audience? Where are they based? What language do they speak? What type of content do they like to engage with? You can also look outward. What are your competitors doing well? What are the general trends and ideas that work in the field? How can you use these ideas when creating your content? Combining internal and external approaches allows you to have the complete picture of who you are creating content for, what they want to interact with and what creative idea you can use to reach them most effectively.

How Locowise social media analytics tool helps:

In “Insights” dig into “Gender and age group of fans” chart to see who your audience actually is. Does your audience consist of mostly males between the age of 45 and 54, or females between 18 and 24? In “Engagement” see “Who is sharing stories” to discover which segments of your audience are more likely to engage with your content. Does this differ from your total audience? This will give you an idea on who your target audience is and whom you should aim to create content for.
Also in “Insights” take a look at “Majority of fans are from” charts for country and city data. In “Engagement” see “Engaged fans are from” country and city list. Is your page mostly popular with a Spanish-speaking audience or do you have many fans from a country that you never considered in your content planning? This data can lead you towards making the decision on what languages to produce your content in or with which approach to tackle an idea.

In “Content” you can analyse the content you have posted to identify the most effective ideas. For example, rank the content by “Advocacy” to see the posts that have been liked and shared the most. You could also rank the content by “Engaged users” which will show you posts that were clicked on by the largest number of people. What content insights can you gather from this that you can use when creating a new piece of content? Is there a specific way you should write the copy or should you include a photo to attract more attention? These rankings give you an idea on how to approach your upcoming posts.
You can also look more broadly. Benchmarking helps you identify best performing content from competing pages. You can rank all the content by the engagement rate which is calculated by taking all the people who have engaged with the post and dividing by the reach. You can also rank by number of comments, number of shares and many more factors. You might find that contests are the most powerful way of attracting comments, or that videos get more engagement than photos. All this will help you make better decisions when creating new content.

Content publishing

The content publishing schedule has to be optimised in order to reach the largest number of people. Factors such as the geographical location of the audience and the days and times they are online, play a crucial part.

How Locowise social media analytics tool helps:

In “Optimise” check the data for “Best day to post”. Click on the top day to also discover what type of post should work best and when the best time to post is. This should be used to determine when you will post the content. It can also help you decide when to repost the content in order to reach an even larger number of people.
In “Engagement” look into “Average post reach by type” to see what content type gets most reach. Look also at “Average content performance” chart to see the average amount of engagement per post type. What works best in terms of reach and engagement? Videos, photos, links or simple status updates? This will give you a simple answer to what you should focus on when scheduling your content.

Content distribution

Your content has been created to be highly engaging and you have scheduled it to be published at the optimal day and time. What else can you do in order to ensure a higher amount of impressions and more engagement? One of the things you can do is to identify and reach out to influencers and influential sites and pages that can help you share the content. With the organic reach of a Facebook post decreasing, it is worth looking into Facebook ads. Running a Facebook advertising campaign promoting your latest content can be an efficient and cost effective way of reaching your audience

How Locowise social media analytics tool helps:

In “Insights” take a look at the list of “External referrals” to see which sources drive traffic to your page. Is there a website in there that you can contact and negotiate with to promote your new campaign?
In “Engagement” look at “Top influencers”. It might be useful to reach out to some of your top engaged fans in order to let them know about the new content that you are publishing.
In “Facebook Ads” section you can see the charts that give you the overview of your ads campaign, including the cost, reach, number of actions taken, gender, country distribution and more.

Campaign review

In order to actually learn and improve your future activities you need to take a look at the performance and results you have achieved with your previous content marketing campaigns in social media. There are many insights that you can identify in those past numbers. What worked well in terms of copywriting, multimedia used and your promotional efforts? What didn’t work so well? Create a list of actionable insights gathered and review this when starting a new campaign in order to optimise it and avoid repeating mistakes.

How Locowise social media analytics tool helps:

In “Content” you can rank your content by different metrics such as “engagement rate”, “viral reach”, “post clicks”, “advocacy” and more. Is your main goal to get clicks to an external website? Or to get more video views? Pick the metric that fits with your goals in order to see the most effective content published in the past. You can also rank the content by the number of times users took, negative action such as hiding it from their walls or un-liking the page.

Reporting

As a social media team within a larger business it is vital to communicate successes to the management and other relevant parties in order to win a greater allocation of company resources. And increased departmental budget will help you do a better job. Sending a monthly social media report with the summary of your activities, results you have achieved and insights you have gathered that everyone can learn from is the perfect tool for this.

How Locowise social media analytics tool helps:

Locowise allows you to setup a custom report that is sent to recipients that you assign on a date that you schedule. It makes the reporting process very smooth and helps you save time by negating the need to manually download raw data and perform calculations yourself.

How can a social media analytics tool support your business needs?

Here’s a quick summary of why your company should invest in a specialised social media analytics solution and how it can support your business needs:

Cost effectiveness and lower social media operational costs. You need less people and fewer resources to analyse and learn from the Big Data you gather when you have a tool that does the laborious work for you.
Improved productivity and time savings. You and your team need to spend less time on data and Excel documents as the tool presents everything needed to know in an easy-to-understand format.
Increased brand awareness. With all the insights implemented when creating new content you are bound to see a higher level of impressions and increase you reach. It naturally follows that you will get your brand in front of more people which will lead to higher brand awareness.
A growing community of loyal customers. With better content and a larger reach comes an increase in engagement too. This helps you build a community of loyal and engaged fans who will help spread the word about your brand.
A way to evaluate social media return on investment. All of the above can be measured, improved and reported on in a quick and efficient way. This is thanks to all the big data you can collect and present in simple but actionable charts.